Introduction
Analyzing the development of the music of Patrick Watson over the years There’s one artist that has amazed me the most during my own development in music. For the past several years I’ve began to love R&B and Neo Soul, and Spotify has guessed these genres quite correctly as seen in my Spotify Wrapped, but this one artist stands out from these genres, and with whom I can connect the most during listening to his songs is Patrick Watson. Patrick Watson composes music in a different genre, namely chamber music but also fusions between classical music and indierock. Over the years, he developed his own style and although these aformentioned genres do make sense, there’s something to his music that makes that I can’t simply classify his music into a specific genre. This can be due to the various styles he showed in his albums, or the strong emotional feeling I get while listening to his music that makes his music more distinctive from other chamber/indierock music. For now I’m going to step away from the genre classification, but I’m going to examine what kind of developments or changes he made while making various albums over the years. This way, I’m going to take a step away from the emotional meanings in his music, analyse what happens on a computational and numerical matter, and then link this back to emotional circumstances again. I’m not only going to compare the albums to each other, but also what happens within an album. Does it start off with a somehow reserved energy, and will it evolve to a more energetic happining? For example, with the album ‘Wave’, Patrick Watson explained in an interview that he went through some grief while writing songs for the album. The beginning of the album feels darker coloured and heavier, while the second half of the album feels more uplifting and bright. Is this also showable in some analytics from the songs with the help of looking at features like BPM and pitch? Furthermore, Patrick Watson also mentioned in an interview that he chose to sing lower pitched in his latest album ‘Wave’. Is this actually true compared to his other albums, or is it just something he intented to do, but remains more or less the same? Link to interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqliZIpHWU0 I’ve made a Spotify playlist including 6 albums. One is left out called ‘The Ninth life of louis drax (original motion picture soundtrack)’ because it doesn’t contain any vocals and is composed for a movie. The playlist contains the following albums: ‘Wave’, ‘Love Songs for Robots’, ‘Adventures in your Own Backyard’, ‘Wooden Arms’, ‘Close to Paradise’ and ‘Just another Ordinary Day’, resulting in a album consisting of 66 songs. (Possibly I will also include EP songs, but that is something I’ll decide later on.) Link to playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6wlIYjCXIv8vzRWxn8Ee9I?si=732901d3b2924598 Typical songs Lighthouse - Patrick Watson Typical because he first uses instruments he is comfortable with, i.e. piano, and uses a height in pitch he uses very often. Lately the song emerges into a heavy instrumentalised song and stronger vocals, where a lot is happening. This is also very tipical for a Patrick Watsong song. Atypical songs The Storm - Patrick Watson Atypical because you directly get the feeling that it comes close to a country song while he often doesn’t show this style in his music. My question here is, why does it feel like a country song instead of just another song from Patrick Watson? More typical and atypical songs will follow. Image See the image I included in my GitHub for an overall score of speechiness per album. The albums Wave and Close to Paradise have similar scores of speechiness that are close together, they don’t differentiate a lot. While other albums differentiate a lot from speechiness within the album itself. Aantekeningen voor mijzelf paar nummers uitkiezen die inderdaad in eerdere albums voorkwamen als hoog pitched, en een paar die dat toentertijd al niet waren stijl ontdekken van patrick watson -> chamber music is dit over de loop van de tijd veranderd? zoeken naar nummers van vroegere albums die erg lijken op nummers van recentelijke albums andere zoeken die totaal verschillen I’ve excluded the album ‘the ninth life of louis drax (original motion picture soundtrack)’ because it is a cinematic album and doesn’t show a lot of vocal use
# A tibble: 1 x 12
mean_speechiness mean_acousticne~ mean_liveness sd_speechiness sd_acousticness
<dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 0.0376 0.679 0.158 0.00963 0.272
# ... with 7 more variables: sd_liveness <dbl>, median_speechiness <dbl>,
# median_acousticness <dbl>, median_liveness <dbl>, mad_speechiness <dbl>,
# mad_acousticness <dbl>, mad_liveness <dbl>Frame 2
### Frame 3
